What is Daylight Saving Day?
Daylight Saving Day, occurring this year on November 3, is officially the end of the Daylight Saving period which began on March 10. This means that not only do you get an extra hour of sleep, but it will also become darker earlier in the afternoon. Brace yourself, winter is coming.
History
Though civilizations have been changing their clocks to match the rise and setting time of the sun since ancient Rome, the modern Daylight Saving concept wasn’t proposed until 1895 by New Zealand entomologist, George Hudson. He presented his study to the Wellington Philosophical Society proposing a two hour daylight saving shift. He followed up with a 1898 paper after considerable interest was expressed from the city of Christchurch.
However, many publications and historians credit Daylight Saving to English builder and outdoorsman William Willet, who came up with his own solution in 1905 when he observed how many Londoners slept through a large part of a summer’s day. Two years later he published his proposal to advance the clocks an hour ahead during the summer months. Robert Pearce, a Liberal Party member of parliament, took up the proposal and introduced the first Daylight Saving Bill to the House of Commons on February 12, 1908. However the bill did not become law, with several other bills failing in the following years.
Port Arthur, Ontario was the first city in the world to enact a Daylight Saving Time on July 1, 1908. Orillia, Ontario soon followed in the city’s footsteps. Austria-Hungary and the German Empire adopted Daylight Saving Time on April 30, 1916 to conserve coal during wartime. Britain, its allies, and other neutral European nations soon followed suit. Russia and a few other countries waited until the next year, and the U.S. adopted the concept in 1918. When the war ended, many lawmakers abandoned Daylight Saving with the exceptions of Canada, the UK, France, Ireland, and the parts of the U.S. It became common again during World War II and was widely adopted in America and Europe in the 1970s as a result of the energy crisis.
